Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Holy Christ

Maybe I'm naive. But the stories of children aged 13 to 15 being detained in Guantanamo Bay to be horrifying.

Guantanamo officials released three Afghan boys ages 13 to 15 last year, but the transcripts of the hearings to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as "enemy combatants" verify they weren't the only teenagers at the prison camp.

Although the U.S. government blacked out most ages from the documents, some remained, including the story of an 18-year-old who said he had been at Guantanamo for two years.

Seriously, do these kids sound like threats to America?

"My infant cousin was born. We had a party. We were playing the drums. We were having fun. When they came they broke the tapes, they broke the drums, they took me to jail, they beat me with a cable then they put salt in it — my wounds," he told the tribunal.

In many parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban regime prohibited music and dancing, imposing a strict form of Islam. They also forced children into religious schools to study the Quran.

Another young prisoner accused of links to an al-Qaida explosives cell said the Taliban came to his village and forced people to work or undergo training.

"At that time I had no beard or facial hair. They told me I was too young to go to war," the detainee testified. "They wanted to train me and then work with them."

The Taliban sent him to a technical school where he received two days of training, but he said "When I returned home after the second day, my mother told me not to go back to the Taliban school because I had no father or older brothers."

The prisoner said he hid from the Taliban each day so he didn't have to go to school. The Taliban stopped looking for him after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but he was then captured by the Americans, who he claimed abused him.

In the United States, children aged 13 to 15 are not allowed to get a job at McDonalds. In Afghanistan, they are beaten until they join the army, then they are beaten when captured by Americans.